Recruiting Young People to Build Submarines

Floor Speech

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Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to share with the House an event which took place last Monday in East Hartford, Connecticut, at the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology. It was a gathering of educators, the U.S. Navy, and shipyard manufacturing, which is a part of the Connecticut economy, to announce a new initiative which is really going to define the job market and the economy of our State for the rest of the 21st century.

Hire Hartford is an initiative that the Navy and Electric Boat shipyard have put together to expand the scope of recruitment and hiring for good careers. These are metal trades jobs and engineering and design jobs, which are all part of an effort that is going on right now that Congress has been funding for the last 10 years, which is to recapitalize our submarine fleet.

Again, Electric Boat, which is in eastern Connecticut, the part of Connecticut that I represent, is a shipyard that has been in existence for about 120 years. We have a submarine base right up the Thames River that has about 16 attack submarines that operate out of Groton, Connecticut, which is where it is located. It is the oldest submarine base in the U.S. Again, between the shipyard and the base, eastern Connecticut has been, in my opinion, justifiably called the submarine capital of the world.

Right now, we are at a place where, again, our country needs to recapitalize an aging fleet of submarines that were built back in the 1970s and 1980s, and a tremendous amount of work is underway. Last year, Electric Boat hired 5,300 workers, some at the Quonset Point shipyard a little bit farther up the coastline in Rhode Island, about two-thirds of it in Connecticut.

This picture shows some of the young 18- and 19-year-olds who are part of this effort who are going through career and technical education schools. Some of the regular comprehensive high schools have also created career pathways to teach people how to be welders, electricians, outside machinists, shipwrights. Again, this is some of the group that were hired this past spring.

If you can see closely, these are 18- and 19-year-olds. They may go to college at some other point in their lives, but at this point they are about to get a badge and security pass so they can go out and be part of this amazing effort which, again, is a platform that the Pentagon and the U.S. Navy have identified as the most critical procurement program in the defense budget.

Last year, we entered into an agreement with the Government of Australia and the Government of the United Kingdom called AUKUS which, again, is about trying to strengthen collaboration between the three countries to push back what is going on in the Indo-Pacific region, where China is exercising totally illegal efforts to control the maritime space.

The one platform which, again, they cannot solve is nuclear-powered submarines. Australia has made a commitment to put $360 billion over the next 10 years, because they have an aging diesel electric fleet, to replace them with nuclear-powered submarines. Those boats are going to be built by these young people that are here and also those that because of the Hire Hartford event that we were at just a few days ago are going to now be recruited as part of this effort.

My friend in the chair represents the State of Alabama. They are part of that effort, as well. Austal shipyard is now going to do steel fabrication to build these amazing vessels. A Columbia-class submarine, which is the new ballistic subs, are 20,000 tons. The Virginia attack submarines, which are the ones that carry conventional weapons and get in and out of places that, again, the Chinese Navy can't find, those are 7,800 tons. These are tremendous wonders of modern technology, incorporating nuclear power. They are, obviously, the state-of-the-art weapons systems that we need to create real deterrence and the talented crews that, again, do amazing work even at a young age.

Hire Hartford, which expands the radius of recruitment out of eastern Connecticut into the central part of the State, was part of the program that we had this past Wednesday, which is going to incorporate the high schools, the job training programs for young adults, the University of Connecticut School of Engineering, which is training a lot of the new engineers that are part of this effort.

It is all going to come together, again, all across the country because we need to make this a national effort to make sure that we have the Navy that we need in the 21st century.

I congratulate all the organizers of this event, led by the Navy, the Submarine Industrial Base Council, which we just funded with a supplemental bill just a few weeks ago, as well as, again, the shipbuilders, the amazing men and women who are doing so much work to protect our Nation.

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